Philately is an important and interesting hobby for many people. The number of stamp collectors in the world is huge, and each collector has their own requirements for what they are collecting and what they need to complete their collection.
Since there are many people who are selling stamps and many different marketplaces, stores, auctions, and other venues where someone may buy stamps, it often takes a lot of time and effort for a collector to find that one stamp they need to complete their collection. It is frequently unrealistic to look through all the possible sellers and find the best prices.
Stamp catalogues are standardized reference books that list all the existing stamps in a particular country or particular area, and are widely used by stamp collectors. Stamp catalogues, however, are not standardized between each other; each stamp catalogue describes stamps in a slightly different way and assigns different reference numbers to the same stamp. Different stamp collectors use different stamp catalogues to describe their stamps when offering them for sale or requesting them for purchase. To complicate the issue, stamp catalogues are published in different languages.
Since a seller may use any catalogue in describing a stamp offered for sale, if a buyer is not familiar with that particular catalogue, they may miss the stamp they are looking for.
Also, since most search engines are not specifically optimized for stamps, and since stamps are described in different ways in different catalogues, any search query will often turn up millions of irrelevant results. A user may miss a listing they could have been interested in because it is buried in a million irrelevant listings for stamps that may have similar names, or stamps that have similar descriptions, and so on.
In addition, many stamps are sold by individual dealers or small shops that may not have enough of a search-engine presence to come up in the first few search results in a search query. Some stamps are sold in closed auctions and thus would not come up in any search results at all. Some stamps are sold by individual dealers who do not have any web presence at all. A user searching for that perfect stamp that completes their collection will have a difficult time finding any of these.
A need exists for a centralized system that can search multiple marketplaces and sellers of stamps and quickly filter out irrelevant search results to leave only the relevant results.